02.12.14

Skynet Watch: From Targeting Terrorists to Targeting Protesters and From Foreign to Domestic

Posted in Law at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Rapid exacerbation of human rights, with surveillance-based torture and assassination that expand in terms of scope

• Utah lawmaker floats bill to cut off NSA data centre’s water supply

  Impending bill from Republican Marc Roberts highlights growing movement at state level against government surveillance powers

• IBM’s Rometty Rebuilds Trust in China After NSA Scandal

• Obama reforms for NSA ‘limited’, says ex-NSA chief

  The former head of the CIA and the National Security Agency, General Michael Hayden has said that the reforms recently announced by president Barack Obama to tackle mass surveillance are limited, as they allow the spy agency “a pretty big box” in which to continue to operate.

  Hayden was reported by the Guardian as speaking at an Oxford University lecture, when he said that while some of the reforms would be onerous for the NSA, the agency still had room to manoeuvre, enabling it to continue to collect metadata.

• The NSA’s top 10 scariest intrusions

  According to documents published by German newspaper Der Spiegel, the NSA uses a tactic called “method interdiction,” which intercepts packages that are en route to the recipient. Malware or backdoor-enabling hardware is installed in workshops by agents and the item then continues on its way to the customer.

• Rand Paul to sue Obama administration over NSA

  Sen. Rand Paul will sue President Barack Obama and top officials in the National Security Agency over surveillance.

• U.S. share of cloud computing likely to drop after NSA revelations

  When the German version of the FBI needs to share sensitive information these days, it types it up and has it hand-delivered.

  This time last year, it would have trusted in the security of email. But last year was before Edward Snowden and the public revelations of the scope of the National Security Agency’s PRISM electronic intelligence-gathering program. After Snowden, or post-PRISM, is a new digital world.

• Programmers Across the Country Are Self-Organizing to Protest NSA Surveillance

  If you visit sites such as Upworthy, Hacker News, BoingBoing or around 5,000 other sites today, you’ll notice an odd headline: a banner stating “Today We Fight Back.” The banner runs a loop of facts about the NSA’s internet and phone surveillance activities, such as “The NSA is regularly tracking hundreds of millions of devices.”

• The NSA Puts Journalists Under a Cloud of Suspicion

  In fall 2013, the U.S. National Security Agency quietly began booting up its Utah Data Center, a sprawling 1.5 million-square-foot facility designed to store and analyze the vast amounts of electronic data the spy agency gathers from around the globe. Consisting of four low-slung data halls and a constellation of supporting structures, the facility includes at least 100,000 square feet of the most advanced data reservoirs in the world. The project represents a massive expansion of the NSA’s capabilities and a profound threat to press freedom worldwide.

• World Protests against NSA with More than 100,000 Participants

  At least 117,000 websites and citizens of the world joined a world day of rejection to the massive surveillance in Internet by the National Security Agency of the United States (NSA) and its allied from other countries.

• NSA protest stirs up memories of AT&T spying scandal

  It was a walk down memory lane for Mark Klein on Tuesday night, when a crowd gathered to hear him speak out, yet again, about the secret sharing of data between a top communications company and the US government.

  Klein, a retired AT&T technician, leaked several internal AT&T documents in 2006 that showed that the NSA was collecting data from AT&T through a restricted room, 641A.

• Internet of Things, Part 1: God’s Gift to the NSA

• NSA denies all requests for personal information

  The Freedom of Information Act requires a release, but the spy agency says it is excluded due to national security concerns.

• Surprisingly mild reaction to NSA surveillance

  One of the legacies 2013 will leave behind, as Andrea Peterson wrote recently in The Washington Post, is that it was “the year that proved your paranoid friend right.” Since January of last year, we’ve learned that the National Security Agency is collecting massive amounts of phone call metadata, emails, location information of cell phones and is even listening to Xbox Live. Shocking as this obviously was to me, as a citizen of the country of “We the People,” one founded on civil liberties, what was perhaps more shocking was how mild the reaction of many Americans was. While polls showed that a small majority of U.S. citizens opposed the NSA’s collection of phone and Internet usage data, after months of reassurances by the President that the programs would be reformed and used responsibly, the numbers seem to have changed (or at least, the story seems to be dying down).

• Pakistan government ordered to bring anti-drone activist to court

  A court in Pakistan on Wednesday ordered authorities to produce an anti-drone activist abducted just days before he was due to travel to Europe to meet lawmakers, in a case that spotlights citizens’ distrust of the unmanned aircraft and government security forces.

• U.S. mulls drone strike on American terrorist suspect in Pakistan

• Documentary on drone use showing at UU Fellowship

  “Unmanned” reports the impacts of drone strategy. This documentary directed by Robert Greenwald, investigates drone strikes at home and abroad through more than 70 separate interviews, including a former American drone operator who shares what he has witnessed in his own words, Pakistani families mourning loved ones and seeking legal redress, investigative journalists pursuing the truth and top military officials warning against blowback from the loss of innocent life.

• Obama’s kill list may expand to include more Americans: Lawyer

  “If indeed there is mulling over the possibility of assassinating another American citizen abroad, really what they should be telling the American people is that we’re moving into an era where state-sanctioned assassinations of people is becoming routine and there is no reason for the American people to expect that this will not develop to the point where Americans are routinely targeted in America,” he added.

• Protest of the day: Activists target Amazon over CIA alliance

  Tuesday’s protest included a blockade of the South Lake Union Streetcar, with activists holding a banner that read: CIAmazon. That was in reference to Amazon Web Services’ partnership with the CIA, and it comes a day after protesters blocked a Microsoft Connector bus on Capitol Hill on Monday.

• Obama’s kill list may expand to include more Americans: Lawyer

  MKUltra also enjoyed the help of ex-Nazi scientists.

• Poland extends CIA prison probe

  The attorney general has extended the deadline till June of the six year old investigation into allegations that a CIA prison was operated in Poland, where terrorist suspects were held and tortured.

• Doctors collaborated in tortures in CIA’s military jails

  Independent research published recently contains revealing facts about the involvement of doctors and other health professionals in tortures in military jails of the USA.

• Ex-CIA Director Woolsey Goes Off the Rails

  Last week it was reported that former CIA Director James Woolsey, forced to resign during the Clinton administration for his bungling of the Aldrich Ames affair, was going around telling people that the reason Jonathan Pollard, the notorious Israeli spy, was still in prison after 29 years is because the U.S. government is anti-Semitic. In short, Pollard remains in prison because he’s a Jew.

• The CIA Helped Build the Content Farm That Churns Out American Literature

  According to Wikipedia, a content farm is an organization that employs large numbers of “writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines.” In a way, the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writer’s Workshop, is a content farm, too—one initially designed to satisfy a much less complicated algorithm sculpted by the CIA to maximize the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.

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